


Troubled Water

by bea_bickerknife



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV), A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: (say that five times fast), But with attempted homicide instead of cycling, Ersatz weaponry, F/M, Gen, Heavily implied previous bisexual polyamory, Olaf-induced near-death experience, Other, Pre-SoUE, Sort of like a triathlon, Villainous monologuing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-11-20 00:32:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11324940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bea_bickerknife/pseuds/bea_bickerknife
Summary: A bar mitzvah, a bridge, and a baptism of sorts.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> As ever, I own none of the characters in this work, nor do I derive any remuneration from its posting.

She may have grown up Catholic, but Georgina Orwell is fairly certain that b’nei mitzvah aren’t supposed to end like this.

This particular bar mitzvah was supposed to end with her nephew – the celebrant– held aloft on a chair and passed around the ballroom by wealthy and adoring relatives too distracted to notice peculiar Aunt Georgina slipping out of the reception hall, her leather satchel stuffed with every envelope she had found on the gift table, as well as an assortment of ill-guarded wallets ( _as if cloakroom attendants can’t be bribed, **honestly,** these amateurs…_) whose fine leather and discreet designer logos were worth nearly as much as their contents. It should have been a thoroughly uneventful heist – quick, lucrative to the tune of a solid five figures, painful only inasmuch as it involved making small talk over lukewarm kugel. It should have gone off without a hitch. 

As she sprints down the hillside toward the woods, she can hear the wheezing breaths of a beady-eyed, silver-tongued, Olaf-shaped hitch behind her.

 _This_ , she reflects, _is why plots make for lousy pillow talk_. Scheming has always been tantamount to foreplay for them, and she should have remembered that the real danger comes afterwards, with the tongue-loosening oxytocin rush precipitated by the sort of sex that decent people might refer to as depraved, but that she refers to as _don’t stop, that’s perfect, don’t you dare bleed on my tablecloth_. She hadn’t intended anything more than a quick mention – at the time, the event had been three months off, and it wasn’t as if their relationship were ever _stable_ – but then she’d caught sight of the way his cock twitched when she mentioned that the mark would be one of her own relatives, and she’d fed him detail after despicable detail until he snapped, rolling over on top of her and fucking her with such delicious brutality that when the table beneath them collapsed, they hardly noticed.

When he skipped town a month later, leaving nothing behind but an empty space on her bureau where she had kept her mother’s jewelry box, she assumed – expected, even – that he’d forget her entirely, scheme and all. He wouldn’t have been the first.

 _Dammit, dammit, goddamn motherfucking son of a **bitch**_ , she curses inwardly, expletives pounding through her head in time with her racing pulse. _Of **course** he remembered. Always did love ripping off a rich kid. **Shit**. _

Even without the aid of her traitorous shoes – _of all the days to wear pumps_ , but she knows better than to run through a forest barefoot – his height will always give him the advantage in a footrace, and he clearly knows it. “That money is _mine,_ my pet,” he shouts as the ground levels out, his gleeful voice much too close for comfort. “I’m taller. I’m faster. You can’t outrun me.”

 _No_ , Georgina thinks as she reaches the trees, _but I **can** outsmart you. _Picking her way through unfamiliar woodland in the dark will slow her down – that’s a given – but there’s more opportunity for cover here, and she’s banking on the fact that Olaf should be equally out of his element. Skewing the odds in her favor will require more concentration than she can spare while darting between trees and avoiding obstacles, so when she spies the skeletal wreck of a rusted-out school bus at the foot of a steep slope off to her right ( _must be a road up there, maybe you could – no, a road is just a racetrack with traffic, don’t give him another advantage_ ), she dives behind a boulder and makes her way toward it on her stomach.  

Between the sudden change of direction and the fact that she’s dropped unexpectedly below his line of sight, she’s bought herself some time. As she slips through the twisted metal maw that once presumably framed the door, she finds herself on eye level with a long, slender rod with a rounded handle, and the words _deus ex machina_ cross her mind – _a little literal, but who’s complaining?_ The gear selector is rusty enough to come away from the remainder of the ruined gearbox without much noise, but when she tests it against her knee, it feels solid, and the tip looks promisingly jagged. _It’s hardly an épée_ , she acknowledges ruefully, sultry-sweet memories of salt and sweat and stolen kisses in the Anwhistles’ fencing studio rising up unbidden, _but it comes with tetanus, and that’s got to count for something._  

Still bent low to avoid being seen through the windows, she makes her way past row upon row of moldering seats. In her school days, she’d always made a point of sitting at the front of every bus she rode, taking pains to separate herself from the troublemakers and degenerates in the back; now, with several thousand dollars of someone else’s money in her handbag and a makeshift melee weapon in her hand, she crouches down in the farthest corner from the door. With a clear view to the front and assurance that the rear window behind her is the only intact piece of glass on the entire vehicle, she allows herself a moment to catch her breath and assess the situation.

He’s after the money. That much she knows. It’s what he plans to do with _her_ that remains worryingly unclear. He’s killed over smaller sums, and even if she were to hand over her ill-gotten gains without a fight, Olaf has never given her any reason to believe he’d let her outlive her usefulness.

 _If you can keep his hands off the money,_ the rational part of her brain cuts in, _then you can keep his hands off **you**._ _You’re hidden. You’re armed. Now you need to be able to move. The shoes can’t be helped, but the dress can. Fix it._

In the eerie stillness of the bus, the rustling of envelopes and bills and checks practically echoes, but she finally digs her switchblade out from the bottom of her bag. Flicking it open, she reaches for her hem and pulls the blue chiffon taut. Regret flashes through her mind, but doesn’t still her hand, and a few minutes later her legs are bare to mid-thigh and her favorite dress features a hemline that might charitably be called asymmetrical. _When you get out of this, you can buy yourself a new one. Come on. Get moving._

It occurs to her that movement without a goal in mind is nothing more than wasted energy, and she pauses midway down the aisle, listening for any sign of Olaf. Crickets and katydids puncture the silence, their chirps punctuated at odd intervals by the hoot of an owl. _So he’s either moved on or he’s been lying low long enough that they think it’s safe to give away their position._ Given that she’s never known Olaf to hold still or keep his mouth shut for more than a few minutes at a stretch, the former seems like a safe bet. _He knows you’ll try to make it into town, and he knows you’ll need your car back eventually. Probably headed back to the parking lot. Wonder how much it’ll cost to replace the tires once he’s slashed them…_

Satisfied that she knows him well enough to trust her instincts, she raises her head to peer out into the surrounding woods. Dense forest stares back blankly through what used to be the front windshield. Her eyes sweep right, registering a path that seems to lead back toward the hotel – a non-starter. Behind her lies the road, but even without Olaf in pursuit, she’s still a disheveled woman in a torn dress with stolen property in her possession, and she can ill afford to draw attention to herself, let alone hitchhike. Off to the left, however, the trees thin out and echo with the low mutter of frogs. _Water_. _Of **course**_. It won’t be quick and it won’t be easy, but if she follows the Rampant River downstream on foot, it should lead her – after how many miles she’s not quite sure – to a familiar childhood fishing hole; from there, it’s a familiar walk through well-lit streets to her front door. Her blistered feet throb in anticipation as she makes her way off the bus, rusted gear shifter tucked swordlike into the sash at her waist and her destination vigorously fixed in her mind.


	2. Chapter 2

After what feels like a quarter-hour of brisk but careful progress, a rushing sound grows steadily louder through the pines and a gnawing unease grows steadily stronger in the pit of her stomach. _You know at some point you’ll need to **cross** the river, don't you? And you know it’s at flood stage? _   

She’s always hated water. More accurately, she hates the sensation of submersion, the tight, panicky awareness that unless she surfaces, the remainder of her life can be measured in minutes. Every time her head dips underwater – the tepid water of her claw-foot bathtub or the black and bracing waves of Lake Lachrymose, it makes no difference –  she feels immediately and overwhelmingly that she has entered a world that was never meant for her, where even the most basic requirement of human life is inaccessible, and she hears the ticking of a frantic clock: _Get **out**_.

All in all, not the ideal candidate for swimming lessons. Despite their fiercest and most formidable efforts, after a summer’s worth of weekends spent coaxing Georgina into the lake, explaining and demonstrating to her, reassuring and reasoning with her, even the indomitable Anwhistles had admitted defeat. Ever on the hunt for a silver lining, Ike had pointed out that she’d finally managed to swim from the shore to the dock, even if she hadn’t actually put her face in the water in the process. Josephine had simply laughed and handed her a life jacket.

 _She always was a realist_ , Georgina recalls fondly, but the smile fades from her face when she realizes just how high the river sounds. _God, I could really use that life jacket…_

Up ahead, the flat woodland drops off abruptly. _Never mind that now. Just get down **to** the river first, **then** figure out how to get to the other side_. _You can cross that bridge when you…_

Reaching the edge, she peers down over a precipice, and this is apparently one of those rare moments when the universe decides it’s on Georgina’s side for once. The river rages, white and thundering and swollen with glacial melt from the Mortmain Mountains, but there, a hundred yards below her, spanning the torrent like the answer to an unasked question, stretches a bridge.

 _…get to it._ Relief washes over her – the only pleasant type of immersion, as far as she’s concerned – and she begins the descent with a light heart. Pine needles blanket the slope, shifting slickly beneath her, and after a few yards of something that resembles exceedingly haphazard downhill skiing, she steps out of her pumps and shoves them into her satchel. Without the twin hindrances of leather soles slipping on the terrain and narrow heels digging into it, her movements grow quicker, more confident. _“That’s our Gee,”_ echoes a voice in her memory, warm and sunny as a lakeside hike in summer, _“sure-footed as a mountain goat, and twice as stubborn.” Oh, if they could only see you now._ The gear shifter bounces lightly against her thigh. _On second thought, probably better that they can’t._

There’s a footpath that runs parallel to the river, nothing more than a narrow strip of overgrown dirt flanked by the wooded slope on one side and a sheer sandstone drop on the other. The bridge, Georgina realizes now, probably connects to another path on the opposite side of the river, which bodes well for her journey home; unfortunately, it appears to have spent more than a few years falling into disrepair. Steel beams that gleamed from her vantage point in the woods are patchy with corrosion up close. Two hulking concrete towers anchor the series of rusty cables that supports the wooden walkway, which suddenly looks both longer and narrower than she anticipated as it sways above the turbulent water.

She steps onto the bridge barefoot. The boards feel slippery and damp, soft somehow, and she finds herself holding her breath as she moves slowly forward, step by wary step. _Good thinking_ , she commends herself as she nears the first tower. _Take your time. Be careful. The wood’s probably rott –_    

With a sickening jolt and a sound like wet cardboard giving way, she discovers just how right she is.

Incongruously, the first emotion that registers is pride at the fact that she didn’t scream. Far less incongruous is the tide of fear that follows as she watches both halves of the broken board plummet downward. They turn over and over in the air, seeming to fall in slow motion, but the instant they splash against the surface far below, they’re gone, the current whisking them downstream with the brisk efficiency of a tug to a stubborn child’s wrist. Swallowing hard, she tears her eyes off the dizzying swirl of the eddies below and focuses instead on her right leg, dangling in midair. A nasty-looking gash runs from the underside of her foot to the outside of her ankle and she winces; while the wood couldn’t support her weight, it must have retained enough of its integrity to cut her as she broke through it.

Her left knee throbs where it made contact with the next plank. _At least you know **that** one is solid_. _If it weren’t, you’d be in the drink by now._

It’s the closest she’s likely to get to a comforting thought in her current predicament. Nothing feels broken, so she drags her leg up through the newly-formed hole in the bridge, shifting forward to test the boards in front of her with shaking hands while she’s still on her knees and comparatively stable.

The first plank feels safe.

The second plank feels safe.

The third plank is partially obscured by a pair of black shoes, and when she catches sight of the bottom curve of a familiar tattoo peeking out between the leather and the fraying hem of a dark trouser leg, she doesn’t have to look any further to realize that, while the wood beneath her may be sound, she herself is far from safe.


	3. Chapter 3

“Well, well, well,” intones Olaf. “Fancy meeting _you_ here.”

In one fluid movement, she’s on her feet and the jagged tip of the gear shifter is poised beneath his chin.

He heaves a dramatic sigh, infuriatingly unperturbed. “I have waited for you,” he begins, “for nearly an hour. ‘Georgina Orwell,’ I told myself, ‘is a reasonable woman. She would never deny a partner, a comrade, a _roguishly handsome man_ his due.’ And when you arrived,” he leers down at her, “on _hands and knees_ , if you’ll pardon my little joke, I thought you had finally decided to do the sensible thing, but instead, here you are threatening me with this…” Beady eyes narrow and he addresses her less theatrically. “What is this?”

“ _Sharp._ ” With any luck, the vitriol should disguise the tremor in her voice. “And if you’re anywhere near as sharp as it is, you won’t make me use it.”

“You wouldn’t hurt an unarmed man, would you?” Never taking his eyes off her, he brings his hands up behind his head, a parody of an obedient prisoner. “Not when you have him at your _mercy_. Not unless he begs you to, anyway.” A lecherous smirk. “That’s what you like, isn’t it, my little minx? Is that what you want?”

 _That tone. **Damn him** , that **tone**_. Her mind knows it’s a trick, knows that the sweetly seductive submission in his voice amounts to nothing more than another one of his costumes, but her body reacts anyway. “I want you,” she says, and victory flashes in his eyes for the briefest of moments before she masters herself and continues more stridently, “to tell me why in the hell you think I owe you _anything_.”

His smirk widens, as if he's been hoping she'd ask that. “I _made_ you, my pet. I did what your noble little _friends_ weren’t brave enough to do. I listened to your ideas. I took you under my wing and into my home,” and here he pauses to lay a hand over the right side of his chest – _he never did have the keenest grasp on human anatomy,_ she recalls – “out of the goodness of my heart, and I didn’t hog-tie you with any hand-wringing nonsense about _morality_ or _free will_. If I hadn’t made you my partner, you’d still be whoring out that twisted mind of yours to a pack of overeducated do-gooders who laugh at you behind your back.”  _  
_

Time and anger and shame haven’t yet quashed the instinct to defend them. “They aren’t all like th–”

“It was a tie, you know. When they threw you out. Do you know who cast the deciding vote?”

Georgina doesn’t know, and she doesn’t _want_ to know. Several months of diligent avoidance have gone into building a mental wall around this very subject, but six syllables bring it crashing down. 

“Josephine Anwhistle." There's a terrible clarity in the way he enunciates her name. "But you’re right. She didn’t laugh at you. Now, what was it she said?” He lowers his right hand to the breast pocket of his jacket. By the time her reeling mind recognizes that he could be reaching for a weapon, he’s already plucked out a sheet of familiar letterhead, the embossed symbol of an eye clearly visible as he unfolds the paper and squints down at it. “Let’s see. Verified Formal Deposition, blah blah blah, in the event of a hung vote, blah blah blah, statement of closest known associate, blah blah, _ah_. Here.” He taps at the page with a ragged fingernail. “Highly original. Tenacious pursuit of knowledge. Intellectual brilliance…oh, but _here’s_ the interesting part: Emotional volatility under stress. Disturbing ethical ambiguities. _Perversion of organizational ideals_.” With a wheezy chuckle, he tucks the transcript back in his pocket. “And she’s one of the ones who _liked_ you. Imagine what the rest of them said. Just _imagine_ what you would have done without me.” He steps toward her, adopting the lofty tone he normally reserves for his most grandiloquent soliloquies; instinctively, she takes a step back. “ _Cautious_ Georgina.” Another step. “ _Clever_ Georgina.” Another step and a rickety handrail digs into the small of her back as Olaf presses his body flush against hers. “And look where it’s gotten you. Your own _club_ can’t handle you. Your… _intimate associates_ want nothing to do with you, and after everything I’ve done for you –  at _great_ personal cost to myself, I might add – you don’t just owe me.” His hand closes around the shaft of the gear lever, wrenching it out of her grasp and tossing it aside with a clatter, and he leans down to cup her cheek. “I _own_ you.”

Cheap wine and cheaper cigarettes lace his breath, and for a moment, Georgina feels sick. Her stomach churns and her head swims, but as her body begins to shake, somewhere beneath the adrenaline and the fear and the grief, she catches a searing flash of anger and latches onto it like a lifeline. Unarmed and pinned too firmly against Olaf to strike him with any real force, only one option remains to make her meaning clear.

She spits in his face.

There’s a split-second flare of fury before something slams shut behind his eyes. “And do you know what I do with my _toys_ when they’re no fun anymore?” he hisses, wiping his cheek with the back of his hand. “When they’re used up and _worthless_ ,” – he punctuates the word with a savage yank that snaps the strap of her satchel, letting it fall to the ground beside them – “and no one’s going to miss them?” Bony fingers wrap around her upper arms and he’s grinning now, empty-eyed, pushing her backwards, forcing her into an ungainly backbend over the handrail. “ _I_ _throw them away_.”

Thrashing as best she can in an effort to twist free from his grip, instinct tells her to kick at his shins, and it’s instinct that damns her. The instant her foot leaves the ground, Olaf seizes the opportunity. With a sidestep that puts her in mind of his early attempts at teaching her tango – _a sacada, it’s called a sacada_ – he sweeps her other foot out from under her.

One final shove, one final peal of triumphant laughter, then nothing. No lanky body in front of her. No cold handrail behind. Nothing beneath her feet. Nothing in her hands.

She isn’t sure if she screams this time. It doesn’t seem important.

Her pulse pounds rhythmically in her head, blurring together with the rush of the torrent below, filling and overfilling her ears, deafening her, but the moment the water closes over her, there is silence.

Silence, and the ticking of a clock.

 _Tick_.

If the bridge had been built much higher, if she had hit the surface at a slightly different angle, if one of a dozen other suddenly vital details had altered even slightly, the impact would have killed her, but instead, the river swallows her down, alive and uninjured and whole.

 _Tock_.

Frigid water presses in on her, forces its way into her ears and her nose, pulls at her hair, and now, _now_ she wants to scream, but her lungs have nothing to give her, and a paradox looms in the swirling darkness: _try to breathe now, and you’ll never breathe again._

 _Tick_.

A swell of current from beneath, a taste of air before she’s pulled back under, but this time she knows where _up_ is, and she struggles for it, cupped hands and flailing feet winning her a second greedy gasp and a glimpse of stony shore.

 _Tock_.

Black water, black sky. In her mind’s eye, a yellow life jacket in a warm, brown hand, and she’s reaching, reaching, reaching, but it’s snatched away and her own hand is nothing but a fist.

_Tick._

Sometimes the torrent laps beneath her chin, sometimes it surges over her head, but its glacial chill is settling in now, an uninvited guest that buries into her bones, and every systole and diastole of her heart seems to pump the cold a little deeper into her veins.

 _Tock_.

Her body hangs beneath her, a useless amalgam of spent and leaden limbs. In a last bid to keep her face above the surface, she cranes her neck, turning skyward only to find herself staring up into the beady constellations of a thousand shiny, shiny eyes.

_Ti-_

**_No._ **

He’s taken more than she ever intended to offer him. He’s taken her ideas, and he’s taken her things, and he’s taken advantage, and he’s taken his parting shot, and he’s taken the money and run, but for as long as her resolve and her breath hold out, Georgina will _not_ give him this.

There’s no anger left in her, no lifeline this time. The water has swept away spite and rage, fatigue has worn away at fear, and all that remains is will.

 _It has to be enough_.

Thought translates into action only after a considerable delay. She forces first her sluggish arms and then her cramping legs back into motion, and it takes every shred of her concentration to coordinate their movements. _Diagonal_ , calls a strident voice in her memory, so sudden and so clear it startles her. _Across the current, not against it. Come on, Gee, I **told** you, you’ll get farther if you don’t fight so hard…_

Exhaustion has done nothing to improve her nonexistent technique. Angling her body, she paddles forward with limbs so heavy and numb that they no longer feel like hers, but every floundering stroke and clumsy kick brings the bank closer until, with a shock of pain that registers even through the near-numbness of her body, her wounded foot scrapes against a stone on the riverbed and she realizes she can stand.

The water recedes as she wades forward, relinquishing her soaked and shaking body bit by bit until she finds herself on the shore. Blood trickles down her ankle from the freshly-abraded gash. Bruises are beginning to bloom on her arms where Olaf’s fingers dug in, but the rocks beneath her feet are dry and she stands for a moment in her ruined dress, filling her lungs with balmy, pine-scented air.

 _It’s over_. The weary ghost of a smile passes over her face. _It’s over, you son of a bitch, and I **won**._

She makes it as far as the embankment before her legs give out.

 

* * *

 

“What a weekend for drownings, huh?” The voice is unfamiliar, male, and it comes from somewhere above her. “You don’t often get two in one day, not this early in the season.”

Somewhere on the other side of her, an equally unfamiliar female voice pipes up. “Oh, that’s right! Didn’t the early shift get a call from way out at the lake?”

“Yep. Dead on arrival, the poor sucker. His wife’s under observation on the Nervous Wreck Ward. Won’t stop babbling about burritos.”

“Tamales, I heard.”

“That’s it, tamales. I knew it was something Mexican.” The man pauses. “Guess it didn’t matter to the leeches, though.”

“Hey,” exclaims the woman, “this one’s coming around!” Georgina feels a hand on her shoulder, but finds she doesn’t quiet have the energy to open her eyes. “Ma’am? Ma’am, you’re in an ambulance en route to Our Lady of Perpetual Calamity Hospital. You were found by a search team sweeping the area for victims of a fire at the Hotel Hartsvaitik, and you don’t appear to have been carrying identification. Can you give me your name?”

Her lips are already forming the first syllable of _Georgina_ when she hesitates. _If he thinks you’re dead – if there’s no record of you after tonight, at least anywhere where he’d think to look – he’ll leave you alone. You’ll never have to see him again._ It’s an appealing prospect, and her mind races through the corollaries. She’s no longer a volunteer. She’s no longer a licensed optometrist, and this evening she’s estranged herself from the last remaining branch of the Orwell family tree that wanted anything to do with her. _He was right,_ she realizes. _There’s no one left to miss you._

Later, maybe, the thought will upset her. For now, it feels like a blank slate.

“Ma’am?” comes the voice again. “Your name?”

She opens her eyes, squinting up into the antiseptic brightness of the ambulance. “I…” Her voice sounds suitably uncertain. “I don’t remember.”     


End file.
